


Eddie Brock Is Trans (x5)

by Palpalou



Category: Venom (Comics)
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Trans Eddie Brock, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 10:48:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18030296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Palpalou/pseuds/Palpalou
Summary: Five snippets exploring how Eddie Brock being trans can mesh with comics canon and symbolism. Also, some cute Veddie?





	Eddie Brock Is Trans (x5)

**Author's Note:**

> Mention of dysphoria, but it's not related to being transgender. Eddie's dad is a bad dad, but at least in this fic he's not transphobic, so the child abuse tag is not (directly) related to that.

1- Pants on fire

 

"Brock is a liar!"

It was on everybody's lips.

"Can you believe it, can you believe?"

He was sitting on his heels, miserable and furious, back of the head pressed against the brick wall hard enough that his skull hurt. Eyes wide open, he looked at the other kids.

They kept their distance. Some stared back, did not pretend otherwise. Others made as if they didn't know, hadn't heard, what? This is a normal day. Playing ball, skipping rope, trading cards. He could see them stealing glance, actually, he didn't even need to see it to know they were. They were all talking about him.

"Brock is a liar!"

His cheeks were burning, and he hated it. He wasn't ashamed, he wasn't a liar.

It was all the nurse's fault. It was all the teacher's fault. He knew she would talk, he knew adults gossiped. Adults loved to gossip about kids, because they were so easy to make fun of and had you ever head of a little kid punching an adult in the nose? Most of them would deserve it. He knew adults gossiped, but couldn't they have gossiped where no kids could hear them?

"God", Eddie spat between his teeth. It meant, "I hope you'll strike them all down, I know you're on my side" and it made him feel a bit better, but only for a short while.

"Brock is a liar!"

And it was only the first day. Tonight, the kids would go back to their families, and they would tell their parents about their day, "You'll never guess what happened at school today! Eddie Brock... SHE got found out!"

And he hated it, hated it, because didn't they realise? He wasn't lying. They were!

 

2- In corpore sano

 

 Eddie had never looked forward to sports class. His school was very into team sports, and those were the worst. It was a litmus test of likeability, hierarchizing the class in terms of who was called in what order. The simple idea of being chosen last made cold prickles run between his shoulder blades. God, don’t let me be the last one to be picked, please and thank you, twice a week, every week. Oh, what fun.

 He had never been good at them either. As a kid, he had always been stick-figure thin, and not the wiry kind of thin either. It seemed like his bones were held together by skin and flesh rather than muscles and tendons. He remembered his father taking him to the doctor's and asking pointed question about the blockers he was taking. But it wasn't the blockers, just Eddie's body.

Then in high school, they were introduced to weight-lifting. Eddie loved it. Loved the soothing repetition of movements, the precision needed to exercise the right muscles, the feeling he was working on his body the same way a sculptor works on a block of stone. Loved seeing his shoulders widen, his arms and legs thicken day after day. Seeing definition appear when before there were only hard bones and flabby flesh.

He got started on T around that time too, and hit his growth spurt.

Looked at himself in the mirror, he knew that, even if someone started spreading rumours around again, nobody could possibly believe he was a girl.

Still, he quit training at school when the teacher in charge of weight-lifting started asking whether he would be interested in trying his hand at competition, before he ran out of excuses. He joined a fitness club instead. His job delivering newspapers earned him just enough for the membership fee.

 

3- Samson

 

Literally speaking, the symbiote and Eddie's relationship was purely physical. His Other lived deep inside his cells, moulded himself around the nooks and corners of his brain surface, threaded through his nerve endings, but their connection didn't go beyond that. Its species wasn't telepathic; in other words, it couldn't read his mind, though they could communicate in a way beyond words, through electric impulses, hormonal discharges, subsonic frequencies, in the privacy of their bond.

Sometimes, though, Eddie still felt like it could read his thoughts, sometimes better than he could, pluck out inchoate sensations before they were put into words.

He had been brushing his teeth, checking his grin in the bathroom's rust-spotted mirror, bending forward to spit in the sink and as a strand of hair had slipped over his shoulder. There had been a second when something had whispered, my hair is longer than I've ever worn it as a kid. Then he'd run water down the drain, scratched the itchy spot under his jaw and gone on with his day.

In those days, they squatted one of the last standing buildings in a block which had been left half demolished after a real estate tycoon had run away with his secretary on company money. From the roof, they could see all the way to the hills beyond the city, black against the deep blue of the sky.

The spent whole evenings up there, just the two of them. On that particular day's, Eddie had brought up a tape player and put it on low enough you couldn't really notice the tinny, raspy quality of the sound.

His Other was perched on his shoulder, swaying with the music. Then it said,

**Like your hair, Eddie.**

Eddie had forgotten the moment in front of the sink, up to that point, but the symbiote hadn't. It was trying to understand why a simple thought had felt like missing a step in the dark.

“I like it too, darling”, he answered. After a moment of reflection, they knew it was true.

“When I was a kid, I used to be afraid of a lot of things”, he mused. “But now we're strong.”

His Other did the equivalent of a slow blink and pressed itself against his cheek. Its dark tendrils and his blond strands tangled in the breeze.

 

4- They fuck you up

 

The symbiote had mixed feelings about their lives before the bond.

It shared the experience amassed during his trek through the universe freely, but the knowledge was presented without context, like rocky formations emerging from an opaque sea. As if its sense of self started with it meeting Eddie. They both knew it wasn’t true, but they pretended.

When it came to Eddie's memories, his Other felt a combination of curiosity and pointed disinterest. It wanted to know Eddie completely, but disliked the idea of Eddie-without-Venom. Eddie shared that feeling. There were a lot of things from his life he wished hadn’t happened, even from the start.

As much as possible, he did as his Other. Pushed the memories below the line of water and let them sink. But when those waters were churned, things had a nasty tendency to float back to the surface.

He didn’t go to mass very often anymore, content with his own trinity of him, it and we. Sometimes though, he still felt a pull. On this particular occasion, the homely had been about the Ten Commandments. The priest had spent an undue amount of time on the fifth. When he left the church, Eddie was gnashing his teeth.

As soon as they had turned around a corner, Venom was pooling around him and they were off, flinging themselves from alley to rooftop to rooftop.

“ **HONOUR THY FATHER?** ” they shouted from the top of a TV antenna, startling a flock of pigeons off their planned course.

“ **WHY SHOULD WE** ”, they muttered darkly as they punched their way through a gang of bank robbers’ armoured truck. “ **WHY SHOULD WE HONOUR, WHY SHOULD WE BE GRATEFUL?** ”

When the police arrived, they nimbly scaled up the bank building, bullets whizzing around them. “ **BECAUSE HE ACCEPTED EDDIE? EDDIE WAS A FACT**.” Beneath their great talons, concrete crumbled and fell in chunks to the pavement down below. The officers stopped shooting and started moving back in a hurry to avoid them, but Venom didn’t pay any attention to what was happening on the street.

“ **EDDIE’S FATHER WAS A COLD, DETESTABLE MAN. _THAT’S_ A FACT. THAT HE WASN’T A BIGOT WILL NEVER BE HELD IN HIS FAVOUR**.” Was the anger the symbiote’s or Eddie’s? Eddie was never short on the feeling, but there was an indignant accent to it which didn’t quite feel like only him. The echo of another pain, similar but not quite the same, and unimportant besides. After all, what did past exiles matter when they had chosen each other above everything else? None, that’s what it mattered.

Maybe Eddie would have pushed further had they been more separate at the time, but what Venom really wanted for now was to roar from the top of the building and see if it was possible to sling themselves from the approaching police copters without pulling them from the sky.

So that is what they did. And they had a lot of fun doing it.

 

5- Thread (as in hanging by a thread)

 

Eddie’s skin felt wrong. That’s because it was burning. His Other had done as he’d asked, blocking the connections that would have informed him of an intense pain. He felt nothing, although he could hear the fire raging behind his back and the raging of the God trapped inside the fire, the sizzling along his back and arms, long claws scrapping on metal. But the door would hold, it had to hold. And so did he. And yet he was growing weaker. Smoke and scorching air choked him down to his lungs, he could barely breathe. Blindness was creeping on the edge of his vision. His Other could do nothing, held safely deep inside. That was a comfort.

He faltered, fell, power of thought blinking on and off. He felt a dark coolness soothing his throat, coming out, but the fire was still around them…!

When he woke up, Eddie’s skin still felt wrong, and yet, it was smooth, repaired while he slept. He couldn’t help scratching at himself. He felt misaligned. He felt empty.

Doctors came, examined him. Gave him drugs without names. To tide him over the withdrawal, he heard. His Other was gone.

But they were wrong; he recognised the symptoms. It wasn’t withdrawal. It was that their skin didn’t fit when it was only him.


End file.
